Once more unto the beach

"A loaf of bread," the Walrus said,
"Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed--
Now if you're ready, Oysters dear,
We can begin to feed."

True oysters of the group /Ostreidae/ include the edible kind, favoured not only by Walruses (and Carpenters) but also connoisseurs of seafood all over the world, including London. These oysters definitely provide *flavour*.

But it's another (mostly unrelated) family /Pteriidae/, where we sometimes find Pearls. Pearls grow from irritations; recently the NorthWestEngland perlmongers invited proposals for a project to adopt for the hackday. Some of them were about irritations with Perl's current tools, and about how to improve them. One of these -- the repetitive, laborious provisioning of web-servers -- led to one of the projects adopted for the next year "Oyster - an incubator for Perls in the Cloud". We'll look at the hackday, which took place a fortnight before LPW, and look at the outcome, the technologies, and the people, the community that helped make it happen.